With so many threats to a free and open Internet, sooner or later, people will need to arm themselves for the fight, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. 'If the baboons succeed in constraining speech and information flow on the broader Internet, the new Internet will emerge quickly. For an analogy, consider the iPhone and the efforts of a few smart hackers who have allowed anyone to jailbreak an iPhone with only a small downloaded app and a few minutes,' Venezia writes. 'All that scenario would require would be a way to wrap up existing technologies into a nice, easily-installed package available through any number of methods. Picture the harrowing future of rampant Internet take-downs and censorship, and then picture a single installer that runs under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that installs tor, tools to leverage alternative DNS servers, anonymizing proxies, and even private VPN services. A few clicks of the mouse, and suddenly that machine would be able to access sites "banned" through general means.'

It's a bit "doom and gloom", but ever so slowly we are edging creepily closer to that reality.

Centralized services would be at the most serious risk. Unfortunately though, the gradual loss of direct peer to peer connectivity due to NAT devices for technical reasons (whether through our own routers, or by wireless/cable ISPs), is already making us largely dependent upon centralized services to reach each other. Consider that many mobile devices cannot establish direct connectivity between each other using publicly rout-able IP's.

So in order for peer to peer censorship evasion technologies to work on a very wide scale, we'd need to simultaneously solve the growing peer to peer connectivity problem. Some may consider this "already solved" with IPv6, but that hasn't occurred yet. NAT solutions like STUN are dependent upon no-NAT peers, and will perform worse as the ratio of NAT to no-NAT increases.

It's a bit "doom and gloom", but ever so slowly we are edging creepily closer to that reality.

Personally, I think it's a bit overblown. Entities like the RIAA and MPAA don't care a wit about censoring speech; they just want people to stop pirating their shit. Of course, people are never going to stop pirating their shit, so they're going to keep trying to pass laws like SOPA, until they eventually give up or (more likely) go bankrupt. Sure, they might one day be successful at buying a law that breaks the internet, but that would be an unfortunate consequence of their end goal, which is to stop little Johny from downloading the latest Snoop Dogg album without paying for it. That's all these entities really care about.

Of course, we could kill all this nonsense today if people would just STOP F**KING PIRATING, but we all know that's never going to happen. I guess it's more important to us to have the latest Snoop Dogg album for free than to get rid of this looming threat that constantly over the horizon.